This silent film is an expressionist comic-tragic treatment of the Fall of Paris to the Prussians in 1870, while New Babylon is a luxury department store representing the corrupt French society that brutally put down the Commune that had taken over the city when the Prussians left. Shostakovich’s score juxtaposes irony, nose-thumbing humor, and quiet introspection, providing a parallel track and commentary on the action rather than accompanying it. Brilliantly scored for a small orchestra, it provides a link to his score for the 1930 ballet The Golden Age, with its famous polka.

The music bucks and bites, with a heavy satirical use of L’ Marseilles and Offenbach’s famous can-can to show the frivolity of the bourgeoisie as well as its duplicitous use of patriotism. Shostakovich displays such a sharp sense of stage picture and mood that you can almost see the images before you. Despite the many snaps and stings, the composer gives you moments of tenderness, cruelly lopped off. An old Communard finds a piano as part of the street barricades and sits down to play a “French Song” (actually a Jewish one). He goes on for a bit before a sniper picks him off.

The music for New Babylon, spread over eight reels, is filled with plenty of music that is perfectly cast in the voice of the young Shostakovich…The sheer energy of the music is one of its most immediately engaging features. The galop-like rhythms appear in reel one and will recur throughout the score in stark contrast to deeply moving lyrical segments. Shostakovich loves to cast solo winds (especially staccato bassoon lines) against trumpet ideas and fast moving strings in this score. It is a rather unique sound that will be explored more in concert works.

Most fascinating in this score is the emotional content of the music. The score is not intent on highlighting specific punctuations but more expressing the fabric of scenes adding a depth to the on-screen images.

The score presented here is as significant as it is relatively unknown and this new recording can lay fair claim to being definitive.

Whether measured by the yardstick of the history of cinema, the Soviet Union or simply as part of the Shostakovich oeuvre this is an important release. Add to that the fact that this recording offers the most complete, skilfully reconstructed and authentic...rendition of the score yet made. It becomes a compulsory purchase. It is a magnificent piece of work and one that shows how even at the tender age of 23 Shostakovich understood the compelling power of the moving image.

Fitz-Gerald conducts the Basel Sinfonietta and they prove to be stunningly fine collaborators.

The first complete recording, on two CDs, on the 1929 film score has more than curiosity value. It affords a rare glimpse of the composer as a youthful mischief, before Stalin and the system contrived to crush his spirit. …a necessary addition to my shelf.

The world premiere recording of Shostakovich’s score for the silent film, New Babylon, a story of Paris besieged by the Prussians in 1870 and the following rise of the Commune. The excellent accompanying booklet details the years after the Russian Revolution when a new freedom initiated a crazy period in the arts that would later be denounced in the Stalin era. Still technologically years behind the western world, Russia were without the facilities to make ‘talky’ films in 1928 when New Babylon was filmed, and a young Shostakovich was commissioned to write a film score in three versions: one for a chamber orchestra, another for a trio, and a third for piano, the object being to show the film in all cinemas, large and small with the appropriate sized accompaniment. Shostakovich won an immediate concession in being allowed to write a score that told the story without it being linked with each frame of the film. Having already earned a living playing the piano in cinemas, he was well equipped for the task, though he had to write the whole score in a very short period, a fact that is often more than evident. The booklet relates that the film was ‘censored’ before it was first shown, and cuts were made in haste. Even then the film was an abject failure, though more recent showings have revealed the artistic style they were trying to achieve. Shostakovich’s score was then officially ‘lost’, but it did exist, as Shostakovich indicated when he wrote that ‘it required some work’ to make it playable as a ‘stand alone’ work. What we have in this new release is the whole of that original score, and, as an addition, the original ending that Shostakovich was made to change so as to give the defeated Revolution forces an optimistic ending. Maybe this is not a major part of the composer’s career, though it shows the direction his music was taking prior to the 1930’s. It is here performed by a chamber orchestra as Shostakovich intended, and conducted by Mark Fitz-Gerald who has already recorded on Naxos other neglected Shostakovich film scores. The recorded quality is very good.